Dear OO-enlighted Monks,

My interest in Perl6 is rapidly growing but sometimes I can’t appreciate/understand a specific language construct. Take for example partial types. The idea seems to stem from Type inference with partial types, Thatte 1988.

I looked around:

In C# it seems to boil down to: allow a single class to be defined in more than one file. See for example What Are Partial Types in C#? and Working with Partial Types. The wiki pages seem to be based on that approach.

In Perl6 it seems something completely different though (correct me if I am wrong).

Could some OO-enlighted/Perl6 Monk explain to me:

  1. What the partial types in Perl6 are?
  2. Why we want/need them?
  3. What the trade-off is: advantages/disadvantages of partial typing?
  4. Isn’t Multiple Inheritance (evil?!) some kind of partial typing?
  5. How does this compare to multiple-type objects?

Cheers
dHarry

Update: Added link to Multiple-type objects in an enhanced C++ persistent programming language.

In reply to Perl6 Partial Typing by dHarry

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